Overthink
The best of all possible podcasts, Leibniz would say. Putting big ideas in dialogue with the everyday, Overthink offers accessible and fresh takes on philosophy from enthusiastic experts. Hosted by professors Ellie Anderson (Pomona College) and David M. Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State University).
Overthink
Hope
It’s the one you’ve been hoping for. In episode 115 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss the meaning of hope, from casual travel plans, to electoral optimism, to theological liberation. They discuss how hope motivates action, and how its rosy tint might be paralyzing. They explore Kant’s ambitions for perpetual peace, and discuss the Marxian imperative to transform the world. They ask, is it rational to hope? How does hoping relate to desire and expectation? And should we hope for what seems realistic, or reach for impossible utopias? Plus, in the bonus, they discuss chivalry, the future, agency, tenure, burritos, and capitalist realism.
Check out the episode's extended cut here!
Works Discussed
Augustine, Enchiridion on Faith, Hope and Love
Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope
Joseph J. Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Religion Within The Limits of Reason Alone, Perpetual Peace
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
John Lysaker, Hope, Trust, and Forgiveness: Essays in Finitude
Adrienne Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach
Anthony Steinbock, Moral Emotions: Reclaiming the Evidence of the Heart
Baruch Spinoza, Short Treatise
Katja Vogt, “Imagining Good Future States: Hope and Truth in Plato’s Philebus”
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Hello and welcome to Overthink,
Ellie:The podcast that trades on your hope that philosophy is relevant for your life. I'm Ellie Anderson.
David:and I'm David Pena Guzman. We sadly seem to live in a hopeless moment. Fascism is on the rise globally. We are witnessing an ongoing genocide in Gaza. There is no sign of capitalism abating anytime soon. And climate change brings us closer and closer to the prospect of our own extinction.
Ellie:But at the same time, hope has been used a lot in political discourse lately. I noticed that when the Democrats decided to make Kamala Harris the candidate over the summer, Michelle Obama said at the DNC that hope is making a comeback. Also, Tim Walz's daughter, I couldn't help but note, is named Hope. Cute.
David:I didn't know that, but It does seem like a callback to Obama era liberalism, since after all, Obama's entire campaign strategy was based on hope, right? And I do think that we see hope making a comeback on the left. And I think it's important to distinguish that from the rhetoric that we see coming out of the right, which sometimes uses hopeful sounding language to ultimately convey an image of what is the opposite of hope, and I'm here thinking about Trump's famous Make America Great Again slogan, which sounds optimistic, but actually hinges on a decadent reading of American culture and American history.
Ellie:Yeah, I think you're right that there's something deeply hopeless in the Make America Great Again slogan in spite of its ostensible optimism. I think part of that for me comes from the fact that the very slogan is hearkening back to some mythic past that never even existed, right? It's Make America Great Again. And one thing I couldn't help but notice in the first presidential debate between Harris and Trump was that Harris very frequently evoked a sense of we're not moving back, we're moving forward. I want to turn the page on Trump's tired rhetoric. So that also made clear to me that she is trading on the American public's idea that Trump is pulling us back, whereas she wants to move us into some more hopeful future.
David:Yeah, and it reminds me of that message that was also part of the Obama campaign, which was forward, period. And there was all that debate about the status of the period. Do you remember that? About whether, forward period sounds like you're maybe stopping? Whereas it should just be forward without a period because that's open ended grammatically. Yeah, and so...
Ellie:I I totally missed this. It's giving that debate between Gen Z and Millennials where Gen Z thinks anytime Millennials use a period it's passive...
David:It's passive aggressive. Yes, yeah, so there was this whole controversy about whether you should use a period in a political slogan because the period actually brings it to a halt and takes away the hope for this open ended future toward which we are moving. But I at least, I'm feeling hopeful about the election now that Harris has replaced Biden, because I was despairing before that decision was announced. I was in a really dark place and thinking that we were guaranteed to have a second Trump presidency. And at least now I see a bit of an opening. In terms of what our political future would look like.
Ellie:I think that's a view that has been shared by a lot of people, especially late in the summer when Harris's candidacy was first announced. I definitely share that view. And I will say we're recording some weeks before this episode is actually going to come out. And so who knows what will have changed by the time this episode comes out on October 22nd. But we did want to do this episode before the election, in part because we thought the rhetoric around hope, like in the couple months leading up to it, was really interesting. And so I think I share that sense of hope. I also felt really hopeful before the 2016 election. And just, obviously we got extremely burned there. But I think there has been a real sea change among liberals, for sure, where there's been a resurgence of hope in the past couple of months. I think leftists have been less hopeful, different takes on that, but I think, of course, like, for someone on the left, if you don't associate with liberalism, right, and you really want something more radical, then, even though you might have kind of a temporary hope, because it seems clear that Harris winning is better than Trump winning by many, many metrics. There's still perhaps a sense that, well, this isn't the kind of radical change that I want to see happen. And I could definitely relate to that too.
David:Yeah, and even though I certainly would want to see a kind of more radical change that is not part of the Harris platform, the prospect of having her over Trump is appealing and the prospect of having our first woman and black woman president is also something that I can definitely get behind.
Ellie:And South Asian woman president, she can be both. I was like, there were so many callbacks to the stuff we discussed in the mixed race episode when Trump, so woefully said that she decided to be Black. Anyway,
David:I read that she said she wasn't black.
Ellie:I know. Oh my god, we could also, we had our hyperreality episode recently and oh my god, there were so many moments in the debate where Trump was referring to things he had read or seen on TV and I was like, this is the hyperreal. Anyway, this is our hope episode, not our hyperreality or mixed race episode, so I will shut up, but I couldn't help but think of those episodes in terms of recent discourse.
David:Yeah, no, definitely "they're eating the cats and dogs" felt very hyperreal and pseudo-event-y, but definitely at the end of that debate, I was left feeling like the emoticon for hope, which is those fingers crossed about where we're heading.
Ellie:Today, we are talking about hope.
David:Can hope be a catalyst for moral action or just encourage wishful thinking?
Ellie:is it rational to hope? And if so, under what circumstances?
David:And does hope have any meaning in a secular context? The history of thinking about hope involves a lot of ambivalence, and we can see this in the origin myth of Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was the first woman on Earth, and she received a gift from many of the Olympian gods. Aphrodite gave her beauty, Hermes gave her cunning and intelligence, and Athena gave her clothing and manual skills. Which makes sense since Athena was the goddess of war, so she knows her way around weapons and tools and things like that.
Ellie:And apparently fashion.
David:And fashion, yes, clothing, you know, how to dress for success in antiquity. And so all of these were great things that Pandora was given. However, Zeus gave her a much more mysterious gift. He gave her a closed box that she was told she had to protect and whose contents are not meant for human eyes. And on top of that, he also gave her curiosity, which is an explosive combination, right? Like, be curious, but don't be curious about this curiosity-inciting-thing that I'm also giving you at the same time. Needless to say, Pandora eventually opens the box and from it fly out all the evils in the world. And the last thing that comes out of the box, according to the Greek myth, is Elpis. Which is hope.
Ellie:I didn't know that hope was linked to the Pandora myth, nor that Athena had given her the clothes, which I love. But this is so interesting, especially because here hope is coupled with curiosity and also a desire to know. And I think we'll see in the episode today that desire is considered a key component of hope in general, although not the only one.
David:Yeah, no, you're right. And aside from the curiosity, what I love about this story is that it leaves the meaning of hope for human life ultimately undecided because we default to thinking of hope as an intrinsic good. But here it actually belongs with the evils in Pandora's box, which led many Greeks to disagree amongst themselves about whether it really was a good thing, whether it's maybe a consolation that makes life livable in the face of all the other bad things that we have to deal with, or whether it's actually the worst of the evils in the box, because aside from the fact that the world is broken and evil, on top of that you have this delusion that good things can happen to you in this hopeless world.
Ellie:And also maybe that they'll happen to you regardless of what you do. I think that's a really common critique of hope is that it just encourages you to sit back and idly accept circumstances because you have hope that they will change for the better. But I think, in ancient philosophy, there aren't a ton of explicit accounts of hope, but the ones that we do have reflect this ambivalence toward hope. Some views are negative. For instance, the Stoic philosopher Seneca thought that we shouldn't harbor any hopes for the future, and Plato's dialogues have some mixed views of hope. But the rise of Christian philosophy made hope a central virtue because it's related to faith. Jesus talked about faith, hope, and love, of course, and medieval philosophers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas saw hope as related to rational faith.
David:Yeah, definitely a lot of writing about hope and faith in the medieval period by Christian theologians, and although most of them do see hope and faith as interconnected, for obvious reasons, one figure who teases them apart is Saint Augustine, because he says that there are two important differences that we need to keep in mind between hope and faith. So hope is always about the future, without exception, while faith can occasionally be about things in the past. So, for example, I have faith that Mary's pregnancy really was a miracle. Or, I have faith that Jesus turned water into wine. So that's backwards looking rather than forward looking. And the second distinction is that we always hope for what is pleasant for us. But sometimes, a Christian especially, can have faith in what is technically unpleasant for them. Such as, you know, having faith that they themselves will be punished righteously for their own sins after death.
Ellie:I want to think a little bit moving past that period about how hope shows up in early modern philosophy. Because in this period, numerous philosophers start thematizing hope explicitly in their taxonomies of human psychology. Like, hope is one feature of our sort of mental, moral, psychological lives. And here, what the philosopher Adrienne Martin calls the Orthodox definition of hope starts to emerge. So, you know, beyond these sort of scattered accounts that we have in Christian medieval philosophy and in ancient Greek philosophy, in the so called Western tradition, we get this orthodox definition of hope. And Adrienne Martin, who calls this the orthodox definition, is actually one of my colleagues, and we'll be talking about her view of hope in a minute, because she wrote this book.
How we hope:A Moral Psychology, and before she gets in her own view, she identifies the Orthodox definition coming out of early modern philosophy with people like Hobbes and Hume, and more recent analytic, moral psychology, and the Orthodox definition defines hope as a combination of the desire for an outcome. And the belief that the outcome is possible, but not certain.
David:So in the case of the election, I desire for Harris to win, and I believe that it's possible that she will, but also recognize that it's possible that she could lose. So I have the belief, and also the desire.
Ellie:Exactly.
David:Or rather, the desire. That I desire that the democratic system of governance be returned to the people, that we take over the means of production, that the electoral college be abolished, and...
Ellie:Okay, don't get ahead of yourself here. We're going to talk about hoping against hope in a second. Because I guess that outcome is technically possible, but it's certainly less likely than Harris winning the election. So for the moment, let's maybe stick with that.
David:Fair. Okay, so what's wrong with this orthodox definition of hope, from Martin's perspective? Defining hope as a combination of desire for an outcome and a belief that that outcome may occur, but may also not occur, It seems like a pretty handy way of thinking about hope.
Ellie:Okay, so yeah, the Orthodox definition considers hope to be a combination of these two things desire and belief. And Martin just thinks that this leaves out essential features of hope. And she starts her inquiry by asking what people are doing when they hope against hope. And, um, I'll move away from the political examples now in part because some of you are certainly listening to this well after the 2024 election. I don't know how that discussion is going to age, but we did feel like it was important to mention given that we're going into an extremely important election. But Martin starts by talking about how she was inspired to pursue a project on hope when she was working at the National Institute of Health's Department of Bioethics. And she was working with a cancer investigator who was conducting a clinical trial on an experimental cancer drug. So let's think about this example. The patients were terminally ill and many of them spoke of hope that the experimental drug might cure them. And this hope could coexist with thinking that it's very unlikely that the drug actually will cure them. So, hoping against hope involves hoping for an outcome that will help you immensely transform your life for the better, and also is extremely improbable.
David:Interesting, so according to the orthodox view, the person who hopes against hope would desire for their challenge to be overcome, for their illness to be cured, and they would believe that it is possible. This seems reasonable, no?
Ellie:Well, Martin's concern is that, that, Orthodox view can't accommodate that two different people with the same desires and odds might differ wildly in their hopes. And this is what leads her to the idea that that combination of desire and belief, which you just said we can apply to the case at hand, isn't going to be enough. She uses the example of two patients, two fictional patients, Alan, Yeah, She calls them Alan and Bess. And Allen and Bess are both advanced cancer patients who enroll in an experimental drug trial that has a less than one percent chance of success. Both of them hope that the drug will cure them, but Alan is not motivated by his hope, whereas Bess is. For Alan, the hope that the drug will cure him is like a nice possibility, but for Bess, it's actually a possibility that keeps her going. She says the mere possibility that the drug will cure her is enough to keep her going. Whereas it just doesn't form her goal. Part of Alan's life or motivational structure.
David:Okay, so I have questions about this concrete example because so we have Alan and Bess, and one of them is doing it for the cure, you know, hoping to be cured, and the other one isn't. And so it seems like they're not really hoping for the same thing, but ultimately we do have to have an answer to the question of why Alan is doing this in the first place. So maybe he's not motivated by a desire to be cured, Maybe Alan is thinking, Oh, I'll contribute to science and maybe this will help somebody else down the road, even if it was too late for me. And so I'm curious about what you think about this or how Martin thinks about this, because my take on it would be, okay, they're not hoping for the same thing, but they're both kind of hoping for something, which is why both are in this trial or in this experiment.
Ellie:Yeah, no, she does specify that Alan is hoping for the same thing. That's part of this thought experiment she's conducting. She says that both of them hope that this experimental drug will cure them. And so what she wants to say is that that is a perfectly reasonable idea, right? That somebody could hope that an experimental drug would cure them, but that it wouldn't necessarily form part of their motivational structure in the case of Alan, right? Whereas with Bess, it actually does form a part of her motivational structure. And so they're hoping for the same thing, but they're behaving differently towards that hope and towards their lives as a result of that hope.
David:I see, so it's actually not a difference of hope, it's a difference of motivation and whether we let our hopes be the reason for our action.
Ellie:Yeah, and so this is what leads Martin to say that a combination of desire and belief is not enough in the account of hope because it can't make sense of this distinction. Because both Alan and Bess have the same desire and the same belief. She says that hope involves two more elements beyond belief and desire. First, the hopeful person has to see their belief about the possibility that the outcome might occur, right? They have to see the possibility that they might get cured of cancer as licensing hopeful activities. Things like engaging in forms of planning, thinking, and feeling. And second, that the hopeful person actually treats their desire as reasons to engage in these forms of planning, thought, and feeling. And Martin calls this account the incorporation thesis because it refers to the fact that the hoping person incorporates their desire for the outcome and the outcomes' desirable features into their rational scheme of ends, into what I've been calling, I don't know like how precise this is, but the motivational structure of their lives.
David:I see. So in the case of Alan and Bess, the idea is that the difference really is that Alan goes about his life as though he will die from cancer, even though deep down he hopes that he will be cured. Whereas Bess actually plans as though she will not die from cancer and devotes time into thinking about her life after she is cured. So she has incorporated her belief and her desire into action, into the things that she actually does, whereas Alan has not. Right, so like maybe she's planning a trip to the beach in two years or something like that.
Ellie:Yeah, and our former professor John Lysaker, whom I recently interviewed for our YouTube channel, about his new book, which is partly on hope, critiques Martin's view on the question of licensing, this first of the two aspects that I mentioned she adds in addition to desire and belief. Because even though Lysaker agrees with Martin on many points, he doesn't think that it makes much sense to say that hope licenses or offers a justificatory rationale for certain activities that are related to the outcome. So he says, imagine I'm told, I hope we'll be happy together. Like, you know, you're in a new relationship. Somebody says, I hope we'll be happy together.
David:Ellie, I hope we're happy together.
Ellie:David, we've had a, we've had a long time to figure out that we are happy together except when we're not. Let's say that somebody tells you, I hope we'll be happy together. Are you hearing when they say that? I am licensed to imagine being happy together, to plan on being happy together, to take pleasure in thinking about that happiness. And Lysaker just thinks that the expressive content of I hope we'll be happy together, it conveys excitement, it conveys anxiety, but it doesn't necessarily convey a sense of authorization or licensing. It's not expressing permission to imagine being happy together.
David:Well, and to act, I think that's where the real obstacle for me is. Because if I tell you, Ellie, oh, I hope we travel more in the future. And then I take that hope as licensing or authorizing certain actions. And then I start buying tickets for you and I to Bali next summer. Without consulting with you, it actually seems like it would be a problematic leap from desire and belief all the way to action, right? And conversely, I kind of wanna come back to the case of Alan just for a hot second, because I worry about the idea that there are people out there who have beliefs and desires, but they somehow don't. translate into action. I still would want to know what motivated Alan to register for that experiment on an experimental drug in the first place. It's just not the case that there are people out there, I don't, I would have to think more about this, but I don't think there are people who fully sever their desires and their beliefs from their mode of operating in the world, even if it's sometimes hard to make a one to one correlation between this behavior was caused by this belief or by this desire.
Ellie:Yeah, and actually, now that I'm thinking about it more, I'm going back to the book and seeing if I remember, I imagine Martin has an answer to this potential objection, but I think what's coming up for me is like, wondering whether we can even still say Alan hopes if on her view hope involves these two other things and it doesn't really seem like Alan is acting on those. I feel like that's, I feel like she must have an answer to this that I'm just missing. I'm actually hoping to interview her for the YouTube channel this fall but I haven't had a chance to before we're recording this episode because she is a very busy woman, very busy philosopher. But yeah, I'm trying to find if I have an answer to that.
David:Well, in the meantime, while you look, I'll say another thing about the Orthodox view. So, I agree with Martin that the Orthodox view is somewhat lacking And the philosopher Joseph J. Godfrey, who wrote a book called A Philosophy of Human Hope, criticizes the orthodox view for a different reason, where he says, yes, hope always entails a desire for something and a belief that that something could come about, but implicit in the act of hoping is also a third element, which I really like. And he says that third element is not this sense of licensing or authorization that Martin is talking about, but imagination. When I hope, I am envisioning a future in which my desire and my belief turn out the right way for me. And so in the case of the hoping person like Bess, she is wanting the cure. She believes that there is a chance that it can work, but in the act of hoping, she's also envisioning in her mind through an act of imagination that world. And so that already entails another cognitive act beyond just desire and belief.
Ellie:Yeah, Martin actually considers that possibility that adding imagining helps us improve on the orthodox definition. You know, we have imagining in addition to desire and belief, but she doesn't think that that goes far enough because she says in the case of Alan and Bess, they could spend equal amounts of time thinking about a cure and they might even have the exact same mental images while still exhibiting differences that lead us to attribute a stronger or greater hope to Bess. So that would be her answer to that, but I am also I'm looking at the text and seeing that I think I have an answer. I think I have Martin's answer to why Alan is still a hoper. So for one, she does note, and this goes back to your point, David, she does say that Alan might have been motivated to enroll in the trial primarily by a desire to benefit future people with cancer rather than like his hope that it will cure him. But that kind of coexists with his hope. But I think we can still consider Alan a hoper because Martin doesn't actually think that you have to Act on your hope in order for your desire for an outcome to be considered part of your motivational structure. She says that hope involves standing ready to offer a certain justificatory rationale for certain activities related to the outcome. So maybe the idea would be that if Alan did spend a lot of time thinking about the outcome, he would be able to justify that in reference to his desire for the outcome, and that is like what is meant here by hope. But if he doesn't actually do that, that doesn't necessarily mean that he doesn't hope.
David:Well, I'm really glad that Martin doesn't require action for something to count as hope, because if she did, it would lead to this potential problem of what a lot of ancient philosophers worried about, which is that hope leads to wishful thinking and to actions that are rooted in a misunderstanding of what is likely and what is not likely. And this is a view that has been voiced more recently by the author Katja Vogt, who says that hope is an attitude of those who have insufficient knowledge or are easily swayed by wishful thinking. And so I think the highest expression of that critique of hope would really target those individuals who act on a hope without maybe calibrating the action against the real likelihood of their belief slash desire.
Ellie:Yeah, in fact, the idea that you don't set out to bring about the desired outcome as a result of but that it still forms a part of your mental, emotional, and planning activities is precisely what is so distinctive about hope for Martin. Overthink is a self supporting, independent podcast that relies on your generosity. By joining our Patreon, you can gain access to our online community, extended episodes, and monthly Zooms. If you'd prefer to make a one time tax deductible donation, you can learn more at our website, overthinkpodcast. com. Your support helps cover key production costs and allows us to pay student assistants a fair wage.
David:We've seen that under the orthodox view, hope involves something that we want and that we believe to be possible. But possibility is a really tricky philosophical concept. To begin with, there are many types of possibility. Something can be logically possible, if I think about it without contradiction, whereas something can be materially possible, only if its existence is consistent with the ordering of the universe, right? With, like, facts about reality. Furthermore, some things might be possible, technically, but have an astronomically small probability of ever happening, right? Like the Earth falling into a black hole. Is it possible? Sure. Probability would be, like, in the 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 percent scale, probably. So, The mere fact that something is possible doesn't mean that hoping for it is rational. So how do we know whether hoping is ultimately rational or irrational?
Ellie:One way of thinking about it is assigning a probability to an outcome, but that of course has a subjective dimension to it, right? But I think it makes a difference here whether we're talking about whether hoping as such is rational or whether hoping for a particular thing is rational. What I've just been saying pertains to the latter, right? And that ends up becoming a big part of Martin's account. But I think hoping in general can be rational, even though particular acts of hope turn out to be rooted in wishful thinking and therefore irrational.
David:I think we should stick to the first question first, whether hoping in general is rational. Because remember that, as we saw with the ancients, somebody could say that any and all acts of hope are rooted in error or misunderstanding, especially if you agree that we live in a hopeless world where human action has no chance of bringing about desired ends.
Ellie:And one thinker who comes down pretty hard against hope is Spinoza because he worries that hope leads to superstitious thinking and that it emerges from a misunderstanding of necessity. In his 1660 Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well Being, Spinoza argues that those who hope are doing so on the mistaken belief that the universe is underdetermined. In reality, though, everything that happens, happens as it was meant to happen by necessity. So, according to Spinoza, to hope for anything is as absurd as hoping that the apple will fall from my hand when I drop it. Of course it will, by necessity. And his critique applies to all the emotions related to hope. He says the same thing about fear, confidence, despair, and jealousy. If we understand that things have necessary causes and must happen as they do happen, then there's no reason for hope or any of those other emotions.
David:Yeah, and of course, this hinges on us accepting his determinism. If we do, then yes, hoping and fearing and being confident would be attitudes that grow out of mistaken and unjustified beliefs, such as the belief that we can alter the course of events in human life. But if we don't necessarily accept that strong position about determinism, then hope starts looking more reasonable. And here, the counterpoint to Spinoza is Immanuel Kant. Hope is really, really important for Kant. And in the Critique of Pure Reason, the First Critique, he famously says that philosophy boils down to three questions. What can I know? What should I do? And for what may I hope? And we want to focus obviously on this third question, but notice how it is articulated. It's not what do I hope for, like as a matter of fact, or what should I hope for as a kind of obligation or duty, but what may I hope for, as in a kind of permission. In other words, the question that Kant is asking is, what can I hope for that is not in conflict with reason itself?
Ellie:Yeah, and Kant says that these three questions have different statuses, and to my mind, the status of hope is really interesting. I was going back to these three questions recently for a conference paper I'm writing, and Kant says that the first question, what can I know, is a theoretical question, and the second question What should I do is a practical one. But what may I hope is simultaneously practical and theoretical. And Kant situates this question as the third one because it follows directly from the second. The idea here being, if I do what I should, second question, what may I then, and this question is simultaneously practical and theoretical in the sense that for Kant, he says that the practical leads like a clue to a reply to the theoretical question. and in its highest form, the speculative question. So it's the link between the first two questions. It's the link between what should I do and what can I know. I like Kant's use of the word clue here too. It's like the practical is pointing the way to the speculative or the theoretical.
David:Yeah, and it, and bridging the gap between the two, I think is a really important point to underscore. And so, I mean, let's go to the heart of the issue. What are we allowed to hope for, according to Kant? And notice that here, there are a number of things that we are rationally allowed to hope for, that for Kant would be rational hopes. And I just want to focus on two of them that I think are really important for moral theory. One of them is happiness. And when Kant writes about happiness, he has a very specific understanding of it that differs from the way in which we use the term colloquially. So, for Kant, happiness is always happiness proportional to my virtue. In other words, I can hope to be as happy as I have been moral in my practical life. And his argument is that obviously all of us as moral agents can improve morally over the course of time if we do what we're supposed to do, which in Kant's moral philosophy is obey the infamous categorical imperative, right, that tells you to treat other people as ends, never as means. And our reason tells us that there is a connection between being moral, doing the right thing, and being happy. So it's a rational belief to form that the good people will end up being happy even if, in reality, that's not actually the case. So it's an idea of pure reason, that there is a connection between reason and happiness. But because it is rational to link virtue and happiness, we can always be justified in hoping for a happy life as long as we are virtuous moral agents. And this is something that comes out in the Critique of Practical Reason, which is the second critique, and also in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Ellie:Speaking of religion, this is just such a Christian view to me. And I think Kant's moral philosophy is amazing, revolutionary, super interesting. But I think this view of how it links up with happiness, it just seems very straightforwardly Christian. It's this idea that if you do well, if you're virtuous, you can hope for a happy life. It doesn't mean you'll get a happy life, but, maybe you will in heaven!
David:Yeah, very much. And if we want something maybe a little bit less obviously Christian in orientation, although probably still covertly Christian because we're talking about Kant, maybe we can talk about the second thing that we are allowed to hope for, and that is peace. Now, when he talks about peace, he doesn't mean inner peace, like peace of the soul. He really means political peace, peace between states.
Ellie:You already got your inner peace with your happiness. You can hope for the happiness. So that's like the inner, and then the peace is hoping for the outer?
David:Yeah, yeah, maybe, yeah, maybe there is a micro/macrocosm thing going on here, who knows? But in his 1795 Treatise on Perpetual Peace, Kant argues that human nature disinclines us toward peace, right? Like, we're selfish, we are often seeking our own interest at the expense of others. So he doesn't want to have, let's say, what is the phrase? Like, pink glasses, pink eyeglasses? View of humanity? Like a rosy...
Ellie:Rose colored glasses! Pink eye glasses. Pink eye glasses. I am never gonna get over that. This is also just a reminder of my traumatic experience getting pink eye in both eyes from a toxic pool in France where your partner, who is an eye surgeon, helped me. Okay, that's a story for another time. Remember we told the story of our like toxic stay in the south of France on one episode but then we didn't have time for it so we had to cut it?
David:I honestly cannot believe I just said that and I am dying.
Ellie:Pink eyeglass. I was just like stalling to give you time to recover.
David:Um, no. So he doesn't want to have like a, what is the right term? Rosy... rose colored glasses, thank you. Anyway, so human nature individually might be self interested, but when we live in society, our private interests sort of balance out. And then also, when you have the introduction of commerce between nation states, that sort of brings about peace. And so you can see here how Kant is part of that cohort of modern thinkers who are paving the theoretical path for the rise of capitalism, right?
Ellie:Capitalism had already been on the rise by this point, but I see, I see what you mean. Industrial revolution would come soon after.
David:Yeah. And so all of this is his interpretation of nature. He says nature just moves us in this direction of peace, despite the fact of individual human wickedness. And so we are rationally allowed to hope for peace. precisely because nature is already and necessarily pushing us in that direction. Of course, as a number of people have pointed out, this requires you to make a transcendental assumption, which Kant does make, and that comes out also in the third critique, which is that nature is teleological, right? That it's heading somewhere. In this case, it has the purposiveness of peace built into it. But it's a rational hope to hope for peace.
Ellie:I just double checked on the industrial revolution. Technically, it was already underway by the time Kant was writing this in 1795, but is it weird that the outcome of peace seems far less probable to me than happiness, though, and therefore less rational to hope for?
David:Well, and it's kind of paradoxical because I agree with you that in some ways, because it's social and it involves states and it's sort of a cosmopolitan project, it seems way more difficult to bring about than just, oh, well, I'm a virtuous person, therefore I can hope for my happiness. It's also weird because here, Kant sort of says that it's inevitable. And so it's, it's one of those cases where we kind of have certainty that peace will occur because it's nature moving us in that direction. So what does it mean to hope for something that nature will bring about no matter what?
Ellie:Hope is a key virtue in some religious traditions, especially Christianity, as we've mentioned. But I don't think it's always super obvious how hope relates to life for those of us who aren't religious, at least not in that sense. Like, hope for centuries in Christian societies was largely considered hope for an afterlife, specifically heaven.
David:Yeah, I mean, for sure, probably not hell. You know, nobody's hoping for hell in the Christian tradition.
Ellie:Unless you're a real freak.
David:Well, you know, Aquinas did say that the pleasure of going to heaven is that you actually get to witness from high on up the suffering, the eternal suffering of the people in the pit down below. So in a perverse way for Aquinas, the desire for heaven is actually a desire for hell.
Ellie:Just a desire not to be in hell, but to watch it from above.
David:Yeah, yeah, to have it as a spectacle.
Ellie:Oh my god. Okay, yeah, I mean, he definitely falls in the real freak category. But that, that Christian view of hope as hope for an afterlife is also why hope has sometimes been seen as not really helping us in our everyday lives, as maybe that wishful thinking you mentioned with Katja Vogt earlier. And I think that notion that hope is futile. It is the notion that hope encourages us just to wish for a better future, but not actually to take any steps to affect that future. And this might make you wonder what role hope might play in more secular contexts.
David:Yeah, and most people who write about hope definitely do so from within a religious frame. They often, even if they're not super religious, they use religious language to try to capture the feeling of hope. And one exception to this trend. is the German philosopher, Ernst Bloch, who gives us an account of hope that is atheistic rather than theist and social rather than individual. And this account is fully developed in his book, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Which is the principle of hope in German.
Ellie:So extra that you said it in German, too. Like, you didn't do that for Kant's critique to den reinen Vernunft? Okay, yeah, my weak German is showing.
David:I know where my strengths lie and it's when it's short titles that are consistent with Spanish pronunciation. Anyways, so Bloch is a really interesting character. And he begins his account of hope by linking it to the essence of human consciousness. He says all human consciousness is fundamentally, or at least partially, anticipatory consciousness, meaning that all consciousness always has this anticipatory structure of being oriented toward that which is not yet. And this aspect of consciousness expresses itself in two ways. It expresses itself as anticipatory affects. Like we have these feelings and these like mental experiences that are anticipatory, like daydreaming or wishing or hoping, which would be an anticipatory affect, but it also manifests itself more broadly in terms of the utopian function of the human mind. And I'll say more about this utopian function because he doesn't mean that in a pejorative way. He really means that human consciousness is by its own nature driven to envision a better future than the status quo. Now for Bloch, hope is an anticipatory feeling and an attitude of consciousness. And He calls it an orientation toward that which is not yet conscious. So what's coming down the pipeline. And he has this really interesting critique of Freud that I won't develop, but in one sentence, he basically says, look, the problem with Freud is that he's so obsessed with the past and with repression, but we really need to look to the future. And that requires moving from the logic of repression to the logic of repression to the logic of hope.
Ellie:I like this framing of hope as essential to consciousness, because it would mean that consciousness is not only intentional in the sense of being directed toward an object, familiar idea from phenomenology, of course, but also anticipatory in the sense of being fundamentally open to the future. Also, I think, something you see in phenomenology. But yeah, like this idea that consciousness definitely has a futural orientation.
David:Yeah, and the openness I think is something that we need to keep in mind because the philosopher that I mentioned earlier, Joseph J. Godfrey, has a phrase that really stood out for me where he defines hope as openness of the spirit with respect to the future. And this openness to the future, according to Bloch now, orients us at the same time toward the new. So hope is always about something new entering your reality. But he differentiates between two types of new. There is just what we will call the new, with the basic term, which for Bloch...
Ellie:New. One is the new.
David:One is, one is new, which actually, it gets really funny because actually for Bloch, new is actually not new, it's old. It's just a repetition of the same. So it's when something technically new emerges in your life and adds, let's say, a piece of furniture to your reality, but it doesn't alter your reality.
Ellie:It's so not new we're just using the familiar word.
David:New for it. Yes. And then there is this other more radical new, which he uses the Latin term novum to capture. And I know I told you it's a little, it's a little funny. And the novum
Ellie:He's gonna use an even older word than new for the new new.
David:Welcome to philosophy folks. And so the novum is what truly grounds real meaningful hope. Real hope is about the Novum. And so the question is, what is this Novum? And here Bloch leans a lot on the writings of Marx and Engels, and he's a neo-Marxist, so that makes a lot of sense. But he's trying to give us a materialist and dialectical interpretation of hope. And he says the Novum has three features. It is social rather than individual. So if you're just hoping for things that you want, you're not really hoping. You're just an opportunist,
Ellie:Mm hmm.
David:It is utopian. I said I would come back to this term. This is it. It is utopian in the sense that it envisions a world without the fetters of alienation. But that doesn't mean that it's a pie in the sky utopian idea. It's a realistic idea that comes from dismantling the status quo. And finally, This hope is not purely mental or psychological. It actually grows, and as he says, it gets educated in the context of engaged action. Presumably, by that he means revolutionary action in a Marxist sense. And so it's not that you hope and then you act, it's that in the act of acting and liberating yourself, you are hoping. The two are fundamentally the same.
Ellie:It's also striking me that your earlier claim that actually what you hope for is the revolution of democratic governance and the abolition of the electoral college is related to Bloch's notion of utopia, because that's not, that doesn't strike me as a pie in the sky utopia, but rather something that envisions a world without alienation. Like, we could actually do that if we had the political will to do so. But I'm thinking too about this idea that hope is rather social than individual, and I think we need to clarify something there, because I'm reminded of this passage in Lysaker's book about hope, where he says that hope is individual, but individuals are social, and what he means by that is, if you turn hopeless, my hope can't take the place of yours. Like, you have to hope on your own. You have to have that orientation of the future. Nobody can have that orientation of the future for you, right? It's kind of similar to that idea that consciousness is futurely oriented that you mentioned a bit ago. But the idea here would be that the hope about the future has to be felt by you individually. But of course, We can shape and share each other's hope, not to mention, of course, hope for social change. So the individuals can hope for social change. In fact, I take it that that's a lot of what we're doing when we're hoping, and that we can work together even though we each have our own experience of hope. And then just the last thing on this too is that, for Bloch you mentioned this Marxist influence, and, If Bloch is right about those three features, that hope is social, that it is realistically utopian, and that it's engaged, then it would mean that what hope ultimately is, is hope for the active transformation of the social world. And you, I think basically mentioned that, this idea that it's bringing about a change. And it brings to mind for me Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, where he says, very famously, probably like the most famous Marx quote because the other ones are Marx and Engels quotes, where he says that philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it. And here changing the world is what we could hope for and how we would hope, right? We would hope in the act of changing the status quo.
David:Exactly, and thank you for mentioning Feuerbach, because Bloch does side with Marx on this point about the importance of transformation over interpretation or pure interpretation. But he also has a critique of both Marx and Feuerbach, interestingly, when it comes to the relationship between hope and religion. Because although his philosophy of hope is fundamentally atheistic, he thinks it's highly compatible with religion, and he thinks that, in fact, what we see in a lot of religious worldviews is just a particular articulation of this fundamental structure of consciousness, which is hoping. And in this regard, he thinks that Marx and Feuerbach both have hyper dismissive attitudes towards religion, and he doesn't like that. Famously, Marx says that religion is the opiate of the masses, you know, it makes you high and makes you forget your oppressed condition. And similarly for Feuerbach, religion is just a projection, right? It's humans projecting their material conditions onto an imaginary divine realm. But Bloch says, no, actually religion can also voice hope by helping us think about the possibility of radical change, even if religions does that in a very particular way. And that particular way for Bloch is eschatological language. So there's a lot of language, of course, in religion about you know, the end of times, the kingdom to come, the radical otherness of this future world where there will be peace and joy and human freedom. And that, for Bloch, is a genuine expression of hope simply presented in religious garb. And he wants us to respect that more, even though his account is fully atheistic, which I really like.
Ellie:Yeah, and the tradition of liberal theology connects religion and Marxism in similar ways, although of course it is not atheistic but it does so by using biblical tales and religious language to convince people to revolt against oppressive material conditions. Very different view of hope in the Christian sense of just hoping for heaven. Like, this is a radical liberation theological vision of hope. But I want to add a point here, about the temporality of hope that I think is connected to this longing for the novum, the radically new, because the philosopher Anthony Steinbock has a phenomenological account of hope that really foregrounds the temporal aspect too. And one of the things I really like about his account is that he says that hope, is an awaiting enduring in its temporal relation to the future and this means that it's related to patience so he says as long as we live in the hope this awaiting is an enduring patience and that I think is so important to point out, this relation of hope to patience. Like, your hope is not, this needs to happen tomorrow. Even if you're hoping for something in a week, there's still a patience that's involved. And certainly, if you're hoping for something that's like radical political change, there has to be patience there.
David:I think this is a wonderful image of hope as patient awaiting. And in fact, when Bloch talks about hope, he does this thing where he says that hope is two things at once. It is explosive in the sense that real hope always negates the actual. It is the negation of the present. But it is also incognito in the sense that it orients us towards a future utopia whose precise physiognomy we cannot yet discern, right? Like it's a silhouette that's out there in the distance. It's real, but we can't really tell what it is. So in hoping, we explode the status quo before knowing what really awaits us on the other side of the horizon.
Ellie:Okay, this is so interesting because it links up really nicely with a philosophical view of hope that comes from Jonathan Lear, who has a book called Radical Hope Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, where he's particularly interested in how there can be social experiences of hope that involve hoping for something that is unimaginable. And the example that Lear really thematizes here, which Martin discusses a bit in her book as well, is that of Chief Plenty Coups, who is the last chief of the Crow people in North America. Chief Plenty Coups evinced a uniquely radical form of hope while the Crow people's ways of life were being destroyed. So, the Crow way of life was centered around being a hunter warrior. There was especially a tradition of hunting buffalo. And a lot of their rituals, even, you know, children's play, a lot of their ways of life had to do with preparing to hunt buffalo and to kill enemies. But with the rise of colonialism and the appearance of white men, the buffalo began to disappear and the crow could no longer define themselves by this traditional way of life. They started to get forced onto reservations. There weren't enough buffalo anymore. They were no longer allowed to engage in their warrior way of life with their enemies. And so this meant that their way of life was no longer possible. And it thus seemed impossible to continue living as a crow. as Crow. The Crow people face the destruction of their very identity. And so rather than say, okay, let's try and keep on living, those of us who are still alive, let's try and keep on living and just find a new way of life, accepting that we're no longer Crow. Plenty Coups sought a way to hope for a new Crow way of life. So the Crow people would continue living as Crow, even when that new way of life was unimaginable. And when Chief Plenty Coups was nine years old, he had had a vision of a tree with a chickadee in it. And the chickadee is the animal whose virtue is to listen and learn from the successes and failure of others. So as an adult, Plenty Coups interpreted this vision as saying, let's be flexible, let's change some of our ways of living, even, and that actually meant even incorporating some of the ways of the white settlers, like farming into their life. And Lear sees this as a version of radical hope because it is an unimaginable form of hope.
David:And I think this story gives meaning, at least for me, to the phrase, hoping against hope, right? Because it uses the term hope twice, in intention with one another. There are ways of hoping that are rooted in probability assessments, realistic blueprints for the near future. And then there are forms of hope that toss all of that out, and even when they are, let's say, incoherent, contradictory, arguably against reason, they have a lot of meaning and they can ground not just individuals but entire communities in the present by giving them something to look forward to, again, even if that thing is incognito.
Ellie:Yeah, and I have to say this story leaves me a little bit uncomfortable because what ended up happening is that the Crow, in order to adapt, ended up partnering with the white settlers and adopting some of their ways of life. So I would love to hear more what you think about that, David. Maybe we can talk about that a little bit more in our bonus segment if you're part of our Patreon community. Stay tuned for that. But I think for now what we can see is that hope is not simply something that comports us to probable futures. It's also not something that is completely irrational, but that exists somewhere between those two extremes and with a lot more nuance and complexity with respect to the structure of human motivation than an oversimplified view of could suggest.
David:We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please consider joining our Overthink community on Patreon for bonus content, Zoom meetings, and more. And thanks to those of you who already do. To connect with us, find episode transcripts, and make one time tax deductible donations, please check out our website, overthinkpodcast.com. We also have a thriving YouTube channel, as well as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter accounts at overthink underscore pod. We want to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan. Our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez, and Samuel P. K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.
